It’s hot outside. There are birds perched on the telephone wire that is in line with the view from my window. It’s bright and blue outside, and evidence of summer rests on the back of my neck and the place where my skin meets my hair. A matted mess. It’s nowhere near Christmas time. But a baby in a manger, surrounded by animal dung, smelly and squealy and bloody, is what’s on my mind. A couple with blistered feet from a long journey, one of them a young woman about to give birth, come to a place expecting welcome and respite and are met with rejection and degradation. There was no place for people like them but with the animals. And so they go, with no other option, to the shed with the hay, the pigs, the dirt and the dung, to wait for the promise that came nine months before. There in the dirt Joseph sits where Mary kneels, jaw clenched, eyes shut, hair drenched with the cursed pain that labor brings — the pain that no other women are around to counsel her, guide her, encourage her through. With weary breath, caked in grime, they bring Him into the world, the one who would change it all. How she must have looked into his eyes, the grit of the backdrop fading away into the sweetest love. How Joseph must have embraced her. How the peace of God must have filled that manger.
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